Absurdistan Read Online Free Page B

one to care if he is dead or alive.”
    I nervously squeezed at my thick left breast, funneling it into a new oblong shape. I noticed a stray piece of salami peel on the table and wondered if I could eat it without Papa noticing. “It was your idea that I should go to Accidental College,” I said. “I’m only doing as you say.”
    “I’m letting you go because I love you,” said my father. “Because there’s no future in this country for a little
popka
like you.” He grabbed the floating dirigible of my right hand, my masturbatory hand, and held it tight between his two little ones. The broken capillaries of his cheek stood out beneath his graying stubble. He was crying silently. He was drunk.
    I started crying, too. It had been six years since my father had told me he loved me or wanted to hold my hand. Six years since I had ceased being a pale little angel whom adults loved to tickle and school bullies loved to punch, and turned instead into a giant florid hymie with big, squishy hands and a rather mean-looking overbite. Almost twice the size of my father, I was, which stunned us both pretty hard. Maybe there was some kind of recessive Polish gene on my miniature mother’s side. (Yasnawski was her maiden name, so
nu
?)
    “I need you to do something for me, Mishka,” Papa said, wiping his eyes.
    I sighed again, slipping the salami peel into my mouth with my free hand. I knew what was required of me. “Don’t worry, Papa, I won’t eat any more,” I said, “and I’ll do exercises with the big ball you bought for me. I’ll be thin again, I swear. And once I get to Accidental, I’ll study hard how to become an American.”
    “Idiot,” Papa said, shaking his double-jointed nose at me. “You’ll
never
be an American. You’ll always be a Jew. How can you forget who you are? You haven’t even left yet. Jew, Jew, Jew.”
    I had heard from a distant cousin in California that one could be both an American and a Jew and even a practicing homosexual in the bargain, but I didn’t argue. “I’ll try to be a rich Jew,” I said. “Like a Spielberg or a Bronfman.”
    “That’s fine,” my papa said. “But there’s another reason you’re going to America.” He produced a smudged piece of graph paper scribbled with outlandish English script. “Once you land in New York, go to this address. Some Hasids will meet you there, and they will circumcise you.”
    “Papa, no!” I cried, blinking rapidly, for already the pain was clouding my eyes, the pain of having the best part of me touched and handled and peeled like an orange. Since becoming gigantic, I had gotten used to a kind of physical inviolability. No longer did the classroom bullies bang my head against the board until I was covered with chalk as they shouted, “Dandruffy Yid!” (According to Russian mythology, Jews suffer from excessive flakiness.) No one dared touch me now. Or wanted to touch me, for that matter. “I’m eighteen years old,” I said. “My
khui
will hurt terribly if they cut it now. And I like my foreskin. It flaps.”
    “Your mama wouldn’t let you get circumcised when you were a little boy,” Papa said. “She was afraid of how it would look to the district committee. ‘Too Jewish,’ they would say. ‘Zionist behavior.’ She was afraid of everyone except me, that woman. Always calling me ‘shit eater’ in public. Always hitting me over the head with that frying pan.” He looked toward the cupboard where the dreaded frying pan once lived. “Well, now you’re my responsibility,
popka.
And what I say, you will do. That’s what it means to be a man. To listen to your father.”
    My hands were now shaking rhythmically along with Papa’s, and we were both covered in sweat, steam rising in invisible white batches from our oily heads. I tried to focus on my father’s love for me, and on my duty to him, but one question remained. “What’s a Hasid?” I said.
    “That’s the best kind of Jew there is,” Papa said.